


Improvisation

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Dragonriders of Pern - Anne McCaffrey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-17
Updated: 2008-12-17
Packaged: 2018-01-25 06:34:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1636709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A comfortable evening for three incomparable musicians.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Improvisation

**Author's Note:**

> I speculate this takes place sometime after Menolly and Sebell have acheived Mastery, but before the crisis that leaves Robinton in weak health. Feel free to place it wherever you like in canon.
> 
> Written for darkdanc3r

 

 

Menolly pressed her fingers backward, feeling them pop with the effort, and then forced them to spread wide with her other hand. The deep scar tissue on her palm protested the stretch, but she ignored the pulling of the skin with the ease of long familiarity. It had become almost a tic over the years, but a healthy one - keeping her scar stretched and moist with oils had given her back almost the full range of motion in her hand.

She slid her fingers up the guitar strings, listening to the sleek sound, and rested them lightly almost where the neck joined the body, picking out a series of high, ringing harmonics. The instrument sang sweetly to her, and she smiled. It was the best she had ever made.

"If you're quite ready," a low amused voice said against her ear, and she turned with a slow smile to regard Sebell, pretty gold Kimi whistling at her from his shoulder. Her own fire-lizards had ranged themselves throughout Robinton's office, lighting on any space not covered with papers. A brief altercation had sent Rocky winging away from the sand table, shrieking insults at them, but the notation Robinton had been working on was now safely covered.

"Don't be impatient," she said to him, amused. "You can be the exact same way, and don't deny it-"

"I don't," Sebell said, raising his hands in surrender. "But if we don't begin soon, the old man over there might fall asleep over his flute."

"Old man?" Robinton asked, his eyes jerking open. "Who's and old man? I was listening to the harmonics. They sound almost perfect."

"Of course you were," Menolly said fondly, and caught Sebell giving him an almost indulgent smile. The both of them would always love him on some level - perhaps deeper than they loved each other. "But I am ready now, and for your information, the harmonics on this instrument _are_ perfect."

"Don't contradict your teacher," Robinton said peaceably. "They're _almost_ perfect. But if you're going to continue to argue with me, you might as well prove it."

Sebell groaned, flexing his fingers, as Robinton pulled the music for an intensely complex piece out from the bottom of the pile. True to his word, it had quite a few instances of harmonic notes, where she would have to suddenly throw her fingers to the very end of the neck. "You do always have to challenge him, don't you," Sebell said with a grin.

"If I didn't," Menolly said, straightening her back, her fingers flying silently through the middle of the song, "he would get lazy, and then where would we be?"

"I'm allowed to be lazy," Robinton said. "I'm old. Shall we?"

Without another word, he tapped out the initial rhythm with his foot, just until Sebell caught it on the tambourine. Menolly launched herself into the introduction, a detailed movement down the neck of the guitar in a minor scale, catching the swell of the music as Robinton entered on flute.

Her lips compressed into a thin line of concentration. Over the years, all of her old bad habits of tapping or nodding along with the music had been broken, and she now only had Sebell's tambourine to assure her she was still on the proper beat.

Suddenly, Robinton flew into a flourish that was _not_ notated in the music. She heard a very un-Harperlike (but very seaman-ish) curse fall from Sebell's lips as he instantly modified to follow Robinton's new improvisation, and Menolly's mouth pulled sideways in a grin as she added one of her own. Then it was Sebell's turn, shaking the tambourine in a shuffle-step counterpoint beat that almost threw all three of them off before Robinton met it with a small snatch of minor scale, which Menolly caught after the first two notes and deftly turned into an arpeggio.

Before any of the three of them knew it, the song they had set out to play had turned into something entirely different, a wholly new melody taking shape in the air around them. Under Sebell's ear, Kimi began to hum, and Menolly's mind raced as she was sure the others' did, trying to play and mentaly notate at the same time. It was good, what they were coming up with - complex, different.

She started to pick out a repeating line with the guitar, and Robinton heard it the second time she emphasized it, following it with a flute melody that caused Kimi to abruptly switch into harmony. Before Menolly knew it, her nine and Robinton's Zair had turned themselves, with Kimi as the soprano centerpiece, into a whole choir.

"Enough!" Menolly suddenly cried, almost dropping her guitar in her haste to get to the sand table. She moaned in disbelief when she remembered that Robinton already had a notation there and scrambled for a clean scrap of hide - any clean scrap - hurriedly slashing a staff down the paper and getting ink all over herself in her haste to put down the notes swimming around in her head.

"You always break first," Robinton said with a sigh. "One day you'll learn to keep the whole thing in your head to the end, so that you don't have to try and re-create the moment later when you build the rest of it."

"You're lucky if you remember where you've put your klah in the morning," Menolly retorted. "If I relied on your memory, half of what we've written together in the last turn would be nothing but faint notes on the wind."

Robinton looked over at Sebell, putting his hand to his heart. "She wounds, me, Sebell. Deeply."

"Her tongue has gotten sharper since she walked the tables to Mastery," Sebell agreed. "She wounds me too. More frequently than you know."

"Wine, then," Robinton announced, producing a skin from beside the shelf crammed with music. "To ease the pain she's wrought on us. And perhaps to lure her into a more amicable mood."

"I am standing right here," Menolly said absently, brushing her hair behind her ear. Without warning, Sebell and Robinton laughed uproariously, and she jerked her head up, scowling playfully at them. "What?"

Sebell rose from his chair, his wineglass held firmly so as not to spill it over her frantic notes. "You've given yourself quite a black mark in our practices," he said solemnly, and she stared at him, clueless.

"What?" she repeated, her lips twitching as Robinton went off into gales of laughter again. "What have I done?"

She flinched away as Sebell's thumb swiped over her cheekbone, and then stared as it came away fully black. She looked down at her hands and saw in dismay that they were covered in black splotches - she must have smeared her cheek rather spectacularly. "Oh," she said, smiling, and then looked down at her notes, pulling a face. "I haven't scribed this poorly since I was an apprentice."

"They do say that the higher you walk, the lower your penmanship," Sebell said, taking her hands and pulling her away from the table. She grabbed the music as she went, and Robinton reached out for it as she sat, raising his eyebrows in an exaggerated manner.

"Perhaps she doesn't need any of the wine," he said. "This looks like one of my notations after a particularly... long night." His eyes twinkled at her, and she smiled, submitting to Sebell's attempts to clean the ink mark off her face.

"Pour me a glass, old man," she said teasingly, snatching the music back. "I'll re-scribe it in the morning when my head is clear again."

 


End file.
